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Journalism of Courage
GENEVA, Dec 10: India tabled a long-awaited new package of financial services liberalisation at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) today amidst wide and wild speculation about its contents and their adequacy, particularly in areas of interest to the United States and other major trading nations and groups.
“I have submitted an offer this morning,” India’s WTO ambassador Srinivasan Narayanan said, even as negotiators from Europe and the US were seen asking if anybody had details of the sectors that the Indian Cabinet had agreed to liberalise in a special session held late Tuesday evening. It remains unclear if India has agreed to liberalise its banking sector – a key American demand. Trade diplomats said as a first step India should be in a position to allow foreign banks to have additional branches. Indian officials said details of the offer as reported in certain sections of the Indian press were inaccurate.
It appears that India’s new package is the result of direct negotiations between Washington and New Delhi and that Geneva may have been kept out of the loop in the run up to those negotiations. In a recent interview with The Indian Express, US Deputy Trade Representative Jeffry Lang said he was in direct contact with Finance Ministry officials as well as Minister P Chidambaram. Lang said he expected some forward movement in the banking sector. “India already allows branch banking, so it ought to be within consistent law and policy to make that kind of commitment here in Geneva,” he said. Lang is expected later this evening in Geneva where he will lead the American delegation in the final negotiations slated to go down the wire.
With India’s offer in, the total number of reworked financial services offers has come up to 47 (with the European Union being counted as one) from 60 countries. Pakistan, Ghana, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua as well as Kuwait submitted offers this week. Offers from Thailand and Indonesia, trade sources said, “were conspicuous by their absence” though some informal papers are floating around at the WTO. Malaysia’s reworked offer has not met with US approval and diplomats say even Brazil is being pushed to make new proposals.
The talks face a Friday deadline for conclusion and trade diplomats said that despite genuine efforts from developing countries, many of them facing financial and political turmoil, there was little sign as to which way a nervous Washington would jump. The US, the world’s biggest market for financial services which it has offered to open wide, has the power to make or break a deal.
The EU, which salvaged a partial pact when the US walked away from the talks in 1995 saying offers of developing countries, including those of India’s, were inadequate, is believed to be ready to sign up now. Brussels, like the US, has offered to effectively open up its financial services industry to all countries who come under the proposed WTO deal. The EU’s trade ministers have scheduled special sessions for any last-minute changes.
Meanwhile, financial services industry officials from major powers have gathered in Geneva in a bid to lobby their negotiators to look for quality of liberalisation instead of quantity. “If you analyse many of the offers on the table, you’ll find serious deficiencies,” said Robert Vastine, president of the US-based Coalition of Services Industries (CSI) which is monitoring the WTO negotiations. “We need to see something good from Indonesia, Thailand and India and very quickly,” he said.
Freedom for PSUs
Industry Minister Murasoli Maran announced today that the Government had "substantially accepted" the Vittal Committee report which had recommended that the numerous administrative guidelines that govern the life of public sector units be reduced.
As many as 696 regulations out of the total 892 have have been deleted and only 196 have been retained.
